Willing

by Scott Spencer

  Soon, the others came straggling in, and we boarded a tour bus large enough for seventy passengers, though we were fewer than twenty. A few of the men had taken a pass on the little side trip, opting to use the time for bed rest or more sex. The Metal Men, however, were there, talking animatedly with each other and more or less ignoring the women they had chosen, as was Jordan, who was drifting in and out of sleep, his head tilted semi-lifelessly on the shoulder of his companion, a slouching, gum-chewing girl with bright green hair and an odd spattering of birthmarks on her face. She held his empty sleeve and idly stroked the cuff, like a little girl caressing a stuffed animal while she drifts off to sleep.

  I sat next to Romulus. He wore expensive-looking slacks and a sweater that was so soft it could have been edible. When the bus started making its laborious U-turn around the hotel’s parking lot, I asked him Everything going well? He made a disgusted face and said Not really.

  An old maroon Jeep swung around us. The driver, an athletic, self-sufficient-looking woman in her twenties, had her long bare arm hanging out the window. Romulus craned his neck to get a better look at her and then pointed his video camera at her and did his best to record her as she drove away. Gotcha, gotcha, he said under his breath. When she was well out of sight, he turned back toward me and said I don’t care about paying a little extra here or there. But I don’t like being hustled. I asked him how he was being hustled, and he rearranged himself on the seat, arched his back, rubbed the small of it, wincing a little. Our friend up there, he said, indicating Castle with his eyes, who was seated with Gabrielle at the front of the bus. Castle seemed to sense he was being discussed. He turned in his seat and looked directly at us, bit his lower lip, pointed, and then turned around again, putting his arm around his wife. Did you see that? Romulus asked. He might have very good hearing, I said. He’s got very good something, Romulus said.

  We were silent for a half mile or so, schoolboys on a class trip who have just been shushed by the teacher. Finally, motivated by curiosity and a need to do my job, I asked Romulus Did he hit you up for more money? Romulus nodded. He knows what you want, he said in a low voice. And the more you want it, the more he’ll screw you.

  He turned in his seat to face me more directly. He had a broad, stubborn face, the face of a man who has endured, the placidity of someone not terribly invested in what you might think of him. Look, he said, I’ve been a businessman since I was ten years old, and I know how to make my profit without sucking the air out of someone’s lungs. You do it one transaction at a time, and every transaction is important. Every transaction involves the totality of who you are as a business. My father taught public high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He made shit money and he was a bit of a snob—but he taught me and my brother to act honorably. This guy? He jutted his chin in Castle’s direction. He’s churning my account.

  So you didn’t like the woman they had for you? I asked. She was all right. She certainly had all the necessary equipment. She could have been a model, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, I said. No, there’s nothing wrong with that. But…Romulus breathed out a long sigh. I’m on vacation, right? So I kind of like to go with the flow, and right now, right now I’m in the mood for someone more my own age, and with a little meat on her bones. You know how they say A boy’s best friend is his mother? Anyhow, he sent someone new—but not what I wanted. He sent me someone older, but still she couldn’t have been more than thirty. I wanted someone my mother’s age, not my mother’s age now, but her age when I was like twelve.

  I laughed, assuming he was kidding, but as soon as the nervous bark was out of me I realized Romulus was as serious as an Oedipus complex. I tried to cancel out my laugh with a few coughs, and then I asked So did Castle have one for you, someone the right age?

  He said it would be a little tricky, plus he wants an extra five thousand if he can arrange it. He made a world-weary face, like a guy standing on his front porch who sees that once again the goddamned paperboy has thrown the Times into the boxwood hedge. Not that I care, but put this right on the questionnaire, and I would have expected it. One of my lawyers went with Fleming last year; he tells them right up-front that he likes flat-chested brunettes, and that’s all he saw. So I figured these people know what they’re doing.

  It struck me that a lot of things that John Q. Public wanted to do with his dick were forever baffling to me. I’d never been able to get into the spirit, say, of any sexual congress that involved special outfits. Naughty nurse’s whites, chambermaid’s apron, executioner’s hood, cowboy boots, even stiletto heels and garter belts—it all seems awfully goofy to me. It’s not that I can’t imagine my way into the excitement of these erotic accessories, and if I were to find myself in bed with someone who needed a bit of rubber, leather, or silk, I suppose I could have accommodated her, get into the spirit of the enterprise. Ditto for handcuffs, nipple clips, whatever. But my penis and I, we are a simple people. All we really ever wanted was to go through the mating rituals, without the actual reproductive consequences, and to be adored.

  Romulus tepeed his fingers, then tapped them together. The thing is, he said, once a woman’s been a mother, she knows how to treat a man; she knows how to give of herself, deeply. He leaned out into the aisle, peered down at Castle, shook his head. I built a very successful company out of nothing. No capital, no backers, just me and my will to succeed.

  I asked him what sort of company, though as soon as the question was out I regretted it. I wanted him to talk about sex, not about his business success.

  I own CutMax, he said, as if anyone would be familiar with that. We’ve been selling knives door to door for nearly two decades, and you want to know how many returns we’ve had in all that time? Under five thousand.

  I nodded sagely, not adverse to giving the impression that I knew something about selling door to door and was perhaps something of a connoisseur of the well-crafted knife, as well, but I was really trying to devise a way to get our conversation back to the kind of woman he wanted to pay for.

  I don’t design them, he said, I don’t manufacture them, and I don’t retail them. We send the specs out, the knives and our other products get made in China or Santo Domingo, and we pick them up in Philadelphia. Direct sales, door to door. I myself did it, back in Pennsylvania. I sold Christmas cards, magazine subscriptions. When my father was on summer vacations, he sold Kirby vacuum cleaners. Also door to door. America was built on door to door. Was this what I always wanted to do? Hell no. What was my dream? Just to make a good living, nothing fancy. When I was a kid, I used to beat my brains out, trying to come up with some kind of invention. And I almost did. I almost invented Velcro. Same way that Swiss lucky bastard came up with it, too. Walking through the fields, looking down at my cuffs, and seeing all these burrs hanging off my pants. The difference between him and me was he had a lot of family money backing him up. I had a father who could barely pay his own bills and a mother—let me tell you about my mother. I once gave her a little yellow glass necklace I got at Walgreen’s, gave it to her on her birthday, and she burst into tears and told me it was the nicest present anyone had ever given her, that piece-of-shit necklace I paid three dollars and twenty-five cents for. She was a hell of a lady, a very special person.

  From selling knives door to door, I said, to having all these beautiful women. Not too shabby.

  But, despite my little tug on the conversational reins, Romulus wanted to make sure I didn’t somehow think it was he himself who was peddling these knives door to door, and as Iceland rolled barrenly by he gave me a history of his company, how it had gone from a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year company to the fifth largest seller of kitchen wares in the country. Then, abandoning brevity, sparing me, it seemed, no salient detail, he explained how his company’s training program worked, how he had figured it out so that the company profited whenever it “hired” new salespeople, all of whom were required to invest nearly a thousand dollars, to cover two weekends of workshops and a sample case of Cut
Max’s best-selling knives. Those who prevailed in the program soon made enough money to justify the initial outlay, the vast majority of hires sold enough knives to relatives and close friends to more or less break even, and the duds went their merry way, though Romulus claimed to believe that even those who failed at knife sales learned enough in their training period to increase their chances of success in some subsequent endeavor.

  Meanwhile, we were closing in on the Blue Lagoon.

  So how did you hear about Fleming? I asked Romulus, but here the direct approach stiffened him. How did you? he shot back, and so I told him about my uncle’s connection, which seemed to satisfy him. My West Coast sales manager, he said. He likes to go to Thailand; in fact I think he’s planning to move there, at least on a part-time basis. He took me there once, insane holiday. He shrugged, flicked his fingers dismissively. Not really my taste. Half these Thai girls are like boys, and most of them are insane. They talk in singsong and do these fake little dances. He arched his back, reached behind himself, and massaged his left kidney.

  Truth is, I should just go home, Romulus said. I’ve got a fantastic wife. How about you? Are you married? I shook my head NO. I was starting to feel some anxiety over my ability to remember everything he was saying. I struggled against the urge to reach into my back pocket for my notebook.

  All right, then, Mr. Question Man, listen, you want to know why I’m here? A couple of weeks ago I’m sitting at home, my wife is asleep. It’s maybe midnight, no later. To me, the night’s still young. I was in meetings all day with some investment bankers who are telling me they’ve got someone who wants to buy my company. Not that I want to sell, but you have to take those meetings, you got to know what’s out there. So I’m stimulated. I’m jazzed. And to be honest with you, I’m sort of lonely, too. I have a couple of drinks to take the edge off, and the next thing I know I’m in the bedroom. We’ve got this beautiful bedroom, overlooking a lagoon I built, absolutely gorgeous, we got about twenty Belgian swans in there, and I’m waking my wife up and telling her Hey I can’t sleep, and she sits up but doesn’t even take off her fucking sleep mask and she tells me there’s Ambien in the medicine chest, and I tell her—I guess the drinks had something to do with this—that what I really need is a blowie. A blowie? she says, as if she’d never heard of such a thing. A blowie, you want a blowie? She’s really trying to make me feel like a loser. I’m used to that. Mary used to be a tennis player, ranked and everything, so she’s very competitive, she likes to put people in their place. So I tell her Yeah, a blowie, also doing business as blow job. Is that a crime? Does that make me some kind of freak? I’ve just spent a day with people who are talking about putting five hundred million dollars in my pocket. You can move mountains with that kind of money. You know what I’m saying? All I’m asking is for her to open her mouth and let me put my dick in. What is the big deal? But forget it. Those days are past between me and Mary. It’s not about blame, it’s about what it is, and what it is is pretty dead. So there I am, down in my study, drinking my single malt, listening to Steely Dan, and doing the one thing I promised myself I would never do: feeling sorry for myself. It just didn’t seem right. I’ve worked so hard and taken so many chances and so many knocks, and now I’m in a position 99.9 percent of men would envy, and where am I? Up on my hind legs like some yappy little dog, waving my paws in the air and begging my wife for a little pat on the head. Do you see what I’m saying? With all that beauty around me, the grounds, the swans, the art, the live-ins, all the toys I ever wanted, and I’m sprouting a woody and don’t have anywhere to put it except here. He showed me his hand, and looked at it himself, with some disgust, as if it were an impostor he has just exposed. It’s against nature is what it is. Any other species, the male gets to a certain point of power, he can have all the sex he wants. But I was getting more action when I had six people working for me and the main office was my Honda. To me, that makes absolutely zero sense.

  We arrived at the Blue Lagoon. The parking lot, granite gray and moist, was essentially empty, save for a couple of tour buses, a rusty blue Volvo station wagon, and three mud-spattered motorcycles. As we got out of the bus, the chalky Icelandic sky was torn asunder by the screaming roar of a squadron of B–1 bombers, in V-formation, wings swept back, noses jutting forward like pterodactyls craning for a drink over a glacial pool. It was as if death itself was winging over us, a dark miracle of technology. I felt a cold sickness at the core of me, helpless and small, and all I could think of was the payload in those long bellies, and the hell that was going to rain down on whoever our enemies were right now. The Metal Men, however, were catapulted into a kind of instant exuberance at the sight of the B–1s. They clapped their hands and then turned them into fists and thrust them into the pale Arctic air. Hap took out his Sony and pointed it in the air, recording the planes in their flight.

  Our pilot used to fly one of those, Castle said to me. He startled me; I thought he was already inside the domelike entrance to the lagoon, arranging our tickets. Castle followed the path of the B–1s with his finger. Those puppies can really move, he said. His voice was full of admiration, crosshatched with sarcasm. It was the voice of a man who had made peace with his appetite for destruction. They weigh almost two hundred thousand pounds, and that’s empty. They go about a thousand miles per hour. Something that size? Filled with explosives? Rockwell builds them, with four huge GE turbofan engines. And they’ve got such fantastic electronics, it makes our plane look like something the Red Baron should be flying. They’ve got everything from repeater decoy systems to wind-corrected bomb and missile dispensers; they’ve got situational awareness, automatic terrain-following high-speed penetration, jamming capabilities, and superprecise weapons delivery. He continued to point, though now the sky was empty. Where are they going? I wondered to myself.

  You know what I love? The names they give them, Castle said, showing me his big gapped smile. Ol’ Puss, Seven Wishes, Global Power, Reluctant Dragon. I often wonder what my old man would say now that the U.S. rules the sky, the earth, the seas. He’s probably spinning in his cockamamie Moscow grave.

  Inside the dome that served as the lagoon’s entranceway and staging area, we were given bathing suits, towels, and a key to a locker. The men’s changing room was dank, poorly lit, with a wet smell in the air just short of mildew. The Fleming men were surprisingly modest as they shed their clothes and wiggled into their swimsuits—gray, vaguely diaperish things that might have been worn in strong-man competitions fifty years ago. We met the women again on a narrow wooden deck built at the edge of the lagoon, where a few other tourists sat at round patio tables, drinking mineral water or beer, and slathering themselves with a thick salty paste, a by-product of the deeply saline waters, meant to accelerate the lagoon’s magical properties. Surrounding the milky turquoise lagoon were mineral-rich outcroppings of rock; truly we were in a lunar spa. Vaguely gaseous steam rose from underwater spouts here and there, and a few of the visitors—all men, none of them ours—trudged toward the smoke with zombielike slowness, their bodies caked with white paste.

  The clouds, driven by a low moaning wind, raced overhead, blocking out the sun one moment, making way for it the next. The cool rays strobed against the chalky blue water. The waters, always warm, were said to be healing, as if the stuff could actually permeate our skin, mix with our blood, flush out our poisoned, withered organs, go around and around our circulatory system like a squadron of fairies, bestowing new life on the pancreas, the liver, the kidneys, the bones. The women we had come here with were meant to be healing, too, I thought, all these specially chosen creatures Castle had gathered up for us, based on the supposition that regular women—the tap water of the gene pool—were not fine enough for our heightened sexual sensibilities, nor sufficient to cure homeliness, or loneliness, or flickering libido.

  This water comes from over a mile deep, Castle said to me. He had a Dixie cup filled with the white paste, which he handed to me. His chest was corrugated with wa
ves of silver and gray hair and his stomach was hard and round, with a long deep scar on the left side and a fuzzy chocolate mole on the right. His legs looked spindly, fragile, hardly able to support him. What is this stuff? I asked. It looks deadly.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. You’re sort of a worrier, aren’t you.

  The young wiry woman who was with Jordan was holding his hand and leading him into the phosphorescent glow of the lagoon, while the other women huddled together on one side of the deck, whispering to each other, touching each other on the wrist, the shoulder, like schoolgirls, but without the mirth, without even much energy, exuding, if anything, a certain low-key collective nervousness, which I credited to their general discomfort at being in our company, let alone our intimate company. Jordan and his companion walked through the lagoon until they were waist-high in the weird blue water. It would have been nice if the water could have healed him. A cool breeze was blowing. I hugged myself to get warm. Jordan’s girl seemed eastern European, Romanian maybe, or Spanish; she might even have been a Gypsy. She had long, finely articulated arms and wore a dozen or so thin silver bracelets on each wrist; her emerald hair was gathered in back by a maroon scrunchy. Despite her thinness, she moved with a stolid determination, swaying from side to side, as if she learned to walk in a bog.

  A few men, not with our group, stood together in the middle of the lagoon. One of them, tan, with a ponytail, and a body that seemed to have gone to fat only recently, had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on his back, the long curling dark hairs of which grew through the Virgin’s extended hands, her lips, and her eyes. He was watching the girl with Jordan, and his jaw was working back and forth. He was clearly furious about something. One of his friends put a steadying hand on him, and he shook it off impatiently. His friends stepped back a little and nodded sympathetically. One was a heavyset guy with a shaved head who looked like the world’s most enormous baby, with a nose like a knuckle and dark little eyes the size of watermelon seeds; then there was a young guy with a long face, who wore an Egyptian ankh and a heavy turquoise and silver bracelet; and the third was a middle-aged man with a Brutus haircut, implacable blue eyes, and a starburst of milky white scars on his shoulder. The four of them walked away from us, going deeper into the water, joining the other men who were trudging as if in a trance toward the spout of smoke coming off the back end of the lagoon.